Fiddlehead (The Clockwork Century 5)

And fired three times in a row, knowing that her shots might spin wild, given the motion of the ship and the air alike; and that she was a good shot, but not a great one, as she might have implied to Henry.

One bullet shattered the window, one bounced harmlessly off the metal casing, and one caught the man in the upper chest, just below his throat. He snapped backwards, clapped his head on the broken window edge, and flipped forward into the aether.

No time to savor the victory. She fired again, this time at their windscreen—hitting it and fracturing it, but not smashing it outright. The front glass was thicker; it had to be, to face the elements.

“Aim for their tanks!” Henry screeched, his elbows shaking with the effort of holding the craft in line.

“Not yet! We’re too close! Any explosion will take us with it. ”

One of the other men leaned out the broken window while the captain kept flying—the grim set of his face implying that yes, they, too, were having a struggle of it. The wind was high and wet, and now he was flying with a broken window that snagged the currents and yanked the ship. She hadn’t sent them down, but she’d given him more to fight, and that was good. It meant one less person shooting at them.

Four shots volleyed fast, fired by a man in an earflap hat and a very large coat.

Two of them didn’t land anywhere important, so far as Maria could tell, but one winged a thruster, and a hard sound hissed against the motor. The last shot plunked into the bag at Maria’s feet. She felt the shove of it, and for a moment assumed the worst—but no, something had stopped it. Hopefully not her extra stockings. She didn’t own a third pair.

She aimed the gun his way, but he ducked inside, and then the Black Dove ducked, too. With a hard, belly-bombing lurch it lost so much altitude that Maria thought something else had been hit, something more important than the fizzling thruster. “Henry!” she shouted.

“Hold on!”

“What are you doing?!”

“Getting away from them!”

“Let’s not get away all the way to the ground, please?” she squeaked.

“Not to the ground…” he said, but whatever else he would’ve added was lost when his full attention was called for at the controls. He pulled up out of the dive in a veering sweep that brought them up again, higher than they’d flown before, to an altitude where breathing the air felt like chewing on ice.

“Oh God. ” Maria coughed, but she held the gun tight and pointed it back at the unmarked ship. She gauged the distance between them and hoped it was near enough to hit, but far enough to escape any fireball that might ensue.

She emptied the last of her chambers and hit the windscreen again, this time puncturing it with a short round of finger-sized holes. But the pilot was unharmed, and she’d come nowhere close to hitting the hydrogen.

Whoever that pilot was, he was good. As good as Henry. Maria could only pray he wasn’t better.

The two ships soared around each other, circling and feinting in a deadly game of chicken, both sides aware that they were careening through portentous weather while strapped to tanks full of a gas so flammable they’d leave a second sun blazing in the sky if one of them lost the match.

Henry wrenched the steering column and kicked a lever by his foot. The ship zoomed upward again, so steeply that Maria’s throat clenched shut and her eyes followed close behind. She couldn’t look. “Henry, what are you doing!” she demanded, not really wanting to know, but needing to know—clutching the gun, but unable to reload it because then she’d have to take her other hand off the Black Dove’s frame. If she did, nothing would be holding her inside but the ridiculous hemp strap, which now struck her as so fragile as to be laughably useless. “They’re right behind us! You can’t outmaneuver them this way!”

“Not trying to! You have to reload!” he cried, leveling out and letting her catch her breath for a bit.

Her hands were shaking and she could scarcely feel them to guide the bullets. She picked them out of her pocket one by one like seeds from an apron. “What are you doing?” she asked again, fumbling and dropping one, losing sight of it as it tumbled downward.

“Are you loaded?”

“Only … only three!” She tried to keep the panic from her voice.

“Those tanks are pretty big. Can you hit them in three shots?”

“I think so, but…”

“From underneath?”

She paused. “I think so. ”

He grinned wildly at her. “The explosion will go up, so we’ll go under. Hang on to your hat!” he roared, and dropped the Black Dove nose-down. The engine gurgled and fought, but didn’t fail, despite the near free fall.

Maria laughed the unhinged cackle of a lunatic when she realized her hat was long gone, so all she had to clutch was her gun and this ship. So she didn’t fall out as she leaned, squinted through her goggles, and aimed.

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